Category: Letters To Editors

Mental Health Professionals Warn About Trump
By Categories: Letters To Editors

Click Here to Read: Mental Health Professionals Warn About Trump by Lances Dodes and Joseph Schachter to the Editors of the New York Times on February 13, 2017.

Dr. Dodes is a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Schachter is a former chairman of the Committee on Research Proposals, International Psychoanalytic Association. The letter was also signed by 35 other psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

Letter to the Editors of NYRB from Donald Moss
By Categories: Letters To Editors

(Click Here to Read: Psychoanalysis after Freud: A Response to Frederick Crews and Other Critics by Glen O. Gabbard, Sheldon M. Goodman, and Arnold D. Richards on this website.)

To the Editors of NY Review of Books:

So, let me get this straight. Per Mr. Crews, we would be led to believe the following analogy:

Freud is to psychoanalysis as L. Ron Hubbard is to Scientology. The analogy would hold because on both of its sides we would find corrupt founders duping millions by selling private fantasy as truth.

Now, though, with that analogy in place, we would still be left with a problem. Continuing to working analogically, we would now have to find a way to place Mr. Crews and Mr. Freud in a companion analogy.

We can easily construct one: Crews will be to Freud as, well, J. Edgar Hoover was to Martin Luther King. Yes, that seems right. After all, King, like Freud, did have his flaws; and Hoover, hating King, went after those flaws. So far, the analogy is working.

We can see the logic, shared here by Hoover and Crews. Continue reading Letter to the Editors of NYRB from Donald Moss

A Spotlight on Torture at Guantánamo
By Categories: Letters To Editors

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Click Here to Read: A Spotlight on Torture at Guantánamo Letters to the Editors of the New York Times on November 21, 2016.

The now shuttered Camp Iguana at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Note from Norman Camp:
I am very appreciative of the NY Times publishing my letter as my study of the psychiatrists sent to Vietnam suggests there must be many other military Continue reading A Spotlight on Torture at Guantánamo

Letter to the Editor of The New York Times by Henry J. Friedman
By Categories: Letters To Editors

HenryJ.Friedman

To the Editor:

In “Listening to Prozac,” Peter Kramer oversold the salutary effects of the new category of antidepressants, but this in no way should obscure his calling attention to its significance in the treatment of moderate to severe depression in adults. As a clinician trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, I value the use of psychotherapy in the treatment of many depressed patients. However, as any experienced therapist will confirm, Continue reading Letter to the Editor of The New York Times by Henry J. Friedman

Psychoanalysis As Poetry
By Categories: Letters To Editors


HenryFriedman

Below is a letter to the editor of the New York Times on June 11, 2016 by Henry J. Friedman about Adam Phillips’s article Unforbidden Pleasures in the New York Times on May 22, 2016.

To the Editor:

If, as Mark O’Connell claims in reviewing Adam Phillips’s “Unforbidden Pleasures” (May 22), Phillips is “the most widely read of living psychoanalysts,” psychoanalysis will gain little credibility in the public eye if people’s reading is restricted to Phillips’s entertaining and glib essays.

O’Connell acknowledges that Phillips “has always been a somewhat equivocal advocate for his profession,” but his review fails to be adequately critical of the way Phillips “plays” not only with the reader but with psychoanalysis. Continue reading Psychoanalysis As Poetry